Improve Discoverability & Education

The Bloomberg app is a platform consisting of a number of sub-apps within it (i.e. Today View, Email & Chat, Securities, HL Search, Alerts, etc.). With all the investments already made in adding more value to users on Mobile, we can be doing more to aid awareness and increase adoption of new and existing sub-apps and their features.

My Role
Lead Product Designer

My Team
2 Designers | 2 Product Managers | 12 Engineers | 1 Researcher

Platforms
iOS | Android

The Problem

Through numerous Mobile UX Research studies over the years, it has been a clear and consistent theme that our users are unaware of current and new features within these subapps that could enhance their workflows had they known they were available. What did we do? We listened to the client!

The Scope

Improve Discoverability
An in-app promotion strategy can further improve discoverability of new and existing content/functionality across mobile and desktop.

Update Education Pattern Library
The mobile component library or “GUI Catalog” will be updated with the new patterns and visual treatment.

Alignment of Platforms
Discoverability patterns on mobile can potentially influence the desktop’s patterns. UX can then build support and alignment across both platforms.

Success Criteria

User Education Strategy
Finding a balance of making our users aware of functionality without disrupting their workflow.

Retention
From discovery to learnability

What do we want to promote?

Which sub apps are the most important and have the most traction?

Various sub apps such as the Today View, HL Search, Securities and Instant Bloomberg gain the most traction within the app.

Competitive & Comparative Analysis

Auditing design concepts and patterns amongst many different apps to understand the landscape of discovery.

Onboarding
Stash, Reddit

New Feature Tooltips
Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Lyft, Bloomberg

Modals, Banners + CTAs
Google, Baby List, Amazon, Seamless

Design Concepts & Patterns

The goal is to find familiar patterns that will invoke a balance of educating our users without disrupting their workflow.

Framework

• Onboarding (first time on the app)

• What’s New (new features within the app)

• Tourlets/Micro-moments (quick tour pattern)

• Promotional Banners

• New Feature Tooltips

• Promotional Modals

• Call to Actions

• Time-based patterns (i.e. Dayparting model)

Customization/Personalization

• User Profile (Pinterest onboarding model: what content is relevant?)

• Suggested functions and features

• User feedback to make suggestions more relevant

• Archetypal defaults (Trader, PM, Analyst, etc.)

Applet Specific

• Chat bot (Instant Bloomberg)

• Search hints (HL Search)

• FAQ (Help Desk)

Cross-Platform Alignment

In 2020, the Mobile Team made it their main objective to create transparency between the Terminal and Mobile teams, find the gaps between the two platforms and create a more seamless experience.

In this case, “What’s New” is an already established platform on Terminal that gives the user a feed of functions that can enhance their workflow. As you can see, the branding uses a black and yellow color style and components promoting the latest features within a function (i.e. Hover menu within Instant Bloomberg chat room).

Mobile Components & Spec

Taking the Desktop Terminal design, I used some of the styles and patterns while keeping true to the mobile conventions.

From concept sketches and wireframes to hi-fidelity design, we prioritized the framework components to test with our Android users.

Framework Components

• What’s New (new features within the app)

• Promotional Banners

• New Feature Tooltips

Banner Component Example

A “What’s New” banner displays a prominent message and related optional actions to promote features that enhance user’s workflows.

Usage
A banner displays an important, succinct message, and provides actions for users to address (or dismiss the banner). They are persistent and non modal, allowing the user to either ignore them or interact with them at any time. Only one banner should be shown at a time.

Principles
Appropriately Interruptive
Banners are interruptive, but their level of interruption should match the information they contain and the context in which they appear.

Test & Learn

Mobile Product Owners decided to deprecate the “Home” screen feature on Android and replace it with the “Today View”. The Today View is an updated version of Home with a feed of News updates, Markets and Securities, and Research articles which is only used on iOS. By replacing the Home feature with the Today View it will create consistency and a seamless experience between the two platforms.

Promote the Today View on Android
We can test the newly added components and patterns by using them to promote the Today View to our 20k (daily active) Android users.

By using the Tooltip component, we can nudge the user to tap the Hamburger icon to open the Menu Drawer.

The Menu will slide open and display a “What’s New” banner with a succinct description about the Today View.

Further down the menu, the yellow badge within the “Today” List Row is used to locate the menu item easier.

Let’s see what happens when user’s tap into the “Today” List Row…

Set the Today View as the Default View
We want to promote the Today View as the default view on mobile.

Tapping on the “Today” List Row will navigate the user to the Today View screen.

The first piece of content within the feed of the Today View is a “Tip” banner to instruct the user to update the Settings to make the Today View the default view of the app.

Tapping the banner will send the user to the Today View Settings screen. A Tooltip will appear to indicate the location of the switch that will update the default view to the Today View.

What did we learn?

By building a knowledge-base of client feedback through years of research findings, the UX team was able to refine and apply new educational patterns and components to the mobile app. These efforts, in aggregate, have bolstered the UX team’s goal to provide a consistent and satisfying user experience to clients. The team will continue to listen and support our clients while developing an educational platform that can enhance their workflows for years to come.